Rive: Animation Tooling with Guido and Luigi Rosso

Animations can be used to create games, app tutorials, and user interface components. Animations can be seen in messaging apps, where animated reactions can convey rich feelings over a text interface. Loading screens can become less boring through animation, and voice assistant products can feel more alive through animation.

But we still don’t see much animation in our everyday applications. This is partly because animation tooling is difficult to use. To make an animation, the typical workflow is to go into a tool like After Effects, render your animation, and then export that animation in a movie format. This format is not dynamic enough to be easily used on the wide variety of development platforms.

The animation library Lottie did improve this tooling by creating a system for exporting animations to JSON and allowing them to easily scale up and down as vectors. But the animations still were simple and unidirectional. The developer did not have much freedom for how to move an animation in response to user input.

Rive is a system for creating dynamic, movable animated objects. Rive allows for the creation of animated elements that respond to user input. Rive has a tool that runs in the browser and allows the user to define the animation.

The animations in Rive use a bone system that allows animators and designers to define the points of the animated sprite that the developer can then manipulate with code. This improves the painful handoff process that exists between animators and developers, and gives the developer some programmatic control.

Guido and Luigi Rosso are the founders of Rive and they join the show to talk about the frictions of animation tooling, and what they have built to improve

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Sponsors

VictorOps is a collaborative incident response tool. VictorOps brings your monitoring data and your collaboration tools into one place–so that you can fix issues more quickly, and reduce the pain of on-call. If you want to hear about how VictorOps works, you can listen to our episode with Chris Riley. Learn more about it as well as get a free t-shirt when you check it out at victorops.com/sedaily.

DataStax provides DataStax Enterprise, a powerful distribution of Cassandra, created by the team that has contributed the most to Cassandra. DataStax Enterprise enables teams to develop faster, scale further, achieve operational simplicity, ensure enterprise security, and run mixed workloads that work with latest Graph, Search, and Analytics technology—all running across the hybrid and multi-cloud. To learn more about Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise, go to datastax.com/sedaily

Vettery is an online hiring marketplace that connects highly qualified workers with top companies. Vettery keeps the quality of workers and companies on the platform high, because they vet both workers and companies. Check out vettery.com/sedaily, and get a $300 sign-up bonus if you accept a job through Vettery.

DigitalOcean offers a simple, developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s optimized to make managing and scaling apps easy with an intuitive API, multiple storage options, integrated firewalls, load balancers and more. Get started on DigitalOcean for free at do.co/sedaily